[Bug 1608495] Re: IMSM fakeraid handled by mdadm: unclean mounted volumes on shutdown/reboot

[John Center]

I don't think it's used by default for IMSM raid installation.  That's
why your devices were likely set up by dmraid first.  When you mentioned
in a previous comment about installing dracut-core, this automatically
installs dmraid with kpartx.  Mdadm never gets involved.  When I've
manually installed mdadm for IMSM raid, I first remove dmraid.  That's
the only way I was able to install Ubuntu 16.04 on top of IMSM raid1 via
mdadm reliably.

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Title:
  IMSM fakeraid handled by mdadm: unclean mounted volumes on
  shutdown/reboot

Status in mdadm package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Committed
Status in mdadm source package in Xenial:
  Fix Committed
Status in mdadm source package in Yakkety:
  Won't Fix
Status in mdadm source package in Zesty:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  Opening this report for Xenial and later as this problem does surface
  again due to moving to systemd.

  Background:

  mdadm is used to create md raid volumes based on Intel Matrix Storage
  Manager fakeraid metadata. The setup usually consists of a container
  set that contains one or more raid volumes. Which is the reason that
  those fakeraid volume are more affected by timing issues on
  shutdown/reboot.

  In my specific setup I am using one of the IMSM raid volumes as a LVM
  PV and one LV of that is mounted as /home. The problem is that
  unmounting /home on shutdown/reboot will update the filesystem
  superblock which causes the raid state to become dirty for a small
  period of time. For that reason with sysvinit scripts there is a
  mdadm-waitidle script which *must* be run after the umountroot (or for
  /home at least after umountfs) script has run.

  With Xenial both umountroot and umountfs are softlinks to /dev/null in /lib/systemd/system, so I am not sure they are good to cause the mdadm-waitidle to be delayed *after* all filesystems are unmounted.
  Practically I see that if /home is mounted on shutdown/reboot, the raid set will go into a full resync the next time I boot (additional pain but different problem: the resync appears to be much more aggressive than in the past, delaying boot a lot and rendering the system barely usable until it finishes). If I manually unmount /home before the reboot, the raid set is good.

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